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Comment by rantwasp | Hacker News Reader

has the disadvantage of needing the SSD (which is probably more expensive than the pi?). here is something I ran across a while back, that if I understand correctly, uses a ramdisk + overlayfs to make the whole thing faster: https://github.com/cattlepi/cattlepi

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Here's my build

    $55 Pi 4 (4gb)
    $8  Official USB charger
    $25 Argon One case (could also get acrylic + ICE tower)
    $10 microSD card
    $12 Sata to usb adapter
    $40 Kingston 240gb SSD (we can't do over 500mb/s anyway)
    

    $120 Total

You get a significant performance boost switching to a 64-bit OS. aarch64 has better SIMD guarantees, hardware AES (over 10x faster), double the registers, and generally more optimizable due to the more streamlined ISA. I haven't tested it yet, but in-memory compression could potentially help with the 4gb RAM limit.

Pardon my ignorance. Does your bare SSD sit outside without any case (connected to the Pi via the SATA to USB cable)? Does it need any kind of heat dissipation mechanism (or cooling) at all?

That's up to you. You can find USB3 SATA enclosures on Amazon for around the $12 mark. There's not a big heat dissipation issue in my experience and a Pi probably isn't exactly going to be taxing the drive very much.

If you don't mind the terrible $/gb ratio, you can even get USB3 thumbdrives that use an SSD.

with 4gigs of ram running the OS from a ramdisk would probably make it fly (even faster than the ssd ;))

Perhaps, but I do web development and Chrome really eats the RAM.

I have a similar setup, but also require a powered USB3 hub to drive SSD. The power from the Pi wasn’t enough to be consistent (disk errors).

May I query which exact operating system did you use? Debian aarch64?

Ubuntu released a version last December that fixed the 64-bit problems pi4 has been having (USB and RAM issues primarily).

https://ubuntu.com/blog/updated-images-of-ubuntu-for-the-ras...

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